Anyone seen this before? I have a Dell R210ii with an H200 in RAID 1 running Server 2012 R2. It has run flawlessly for a few years but in the last several months if I do a normal restart from the OS the H200 is not initialized and it results in no boot device. The fix is a cold boot (power cycle) from the iDrac6.

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Latest BIOS on the chassis and latest firmware on the controller. Just did that this morning. Not a drive or cable issue since the H200 isn't even seen during restart but a cold boot loads it just fine.

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Lol, the server isn’t cold, we are talking about cold boot (power cycle). It’s a PCIe H200 controller. Cables are not an issue as the controller BIOS will normally load even if there were no drives present. Thanks for the advice though.

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I've seen something that may be similar, though it was on totally different hardware: Basically a server that had an old 3ware card with a RAID array. The server would try to boot faster than the array could be initialized, and thus attempted to boot off the array before it was ready. You'd get the no boot device error, but selecting retry boot always worked.

My solution was to move the array way down in the boot order so it had a little more time to be ready.

I'm guessing your server might boot faster on a warm boot than a cold one, so maybe the array isn't ready yet. Same trick might work if that's the case. Perhaps stick a PXE boot attempt ahead of the array in the boot order as that inserts a pretty lengthy delay before it gives up trying to find a PXE server.